DOWNTOWN AND ALL AROUND.

DUTCH-BORN MODERN CHOREOGRAPHER TON SIMONS, WITH ALMOST EIGHTY WORKS TO HIS CREDIT, HAS BECOME A FORCE IN AMERICAN DANCE AS WELL. THIS MONTH HE CREATES A WORK FOR NORTH CAROLINA SCHOOL OF THE ARTS.

Versatile "downtown" and transatlantic choreographer Ton Simons moves easily between modern dance and ballet. Born in Holland, he directed his own company, Ton Simons and Dancers, based in lower Manhattan until it was disbanded recently, and he has been resident choreographer at the Rotterdam Dance Company since 1987. The honors he has received include our National Endowment for the Arts grants and the highest Dutch dance awards, the National Choreography Prize and the Sonia Gaskell Prize. Simons's modern dance works have been performed on European television and at such important events as the Holland and Prague festivals; his Magnificat--For a New City, an evening-length work for the Tanztheater of Der Komische Oper unter den Linden in Berlin had its premiere last November. This month he returns to the North Carolina School of the Arts to choreograph for its students.

Francia Russell, coartistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet with her husband, Kent Stowell, first encountered Simons's work while viewing videotapes for the NEA Grants to Dance Companies panel. His modern approach was no barrier for her. "The style of movement was so beautiful," she says. "He gave value to pure line, and he was so musical I felt he could relate to ballet dancers." In 1995 Simons made Perilous Night for PNB's Offstage workshop program--"complicated, fast, and riveting," according to Martha Ullman West [Dance Magazine, October 1996, page 52]. Then in 1996 came The Tenderness of Patient Minds, set to Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3 in G. Russell remarks with enthusiasm on Simons's rapport with the dancers: "He is very nice, very gentle, serious, and sweet. And he saw a lot in particular dancers." Simons, with characteristic gallantry, gusto, and self-deprecating humor, responds, "Those dancers are so brilliant! If I wouldn't be able to make them look good, I would be a complete idiot. They were fearless--they'd try anything."

Tenderness is in many ways a typical example of Simons's style. Although somewhat less angular than his usual work, it still uses well-trained dancers whose long, clean lines are shown off clearly in sleek dancewear; the wide-ranging vocabulary includes Cunningham-esque bending of the spine, big jumps, inventive shapes, and clear, sculptural images, while making fresh, accomplished use of ballet steps and pointe work.

Never mickey-mousing the music, the piece is faithful to the tenderness and dignity of Mozart, one of Simons's favored classical composers. The concerto's complexity is well served by the counterpoint that Simons devises for couples spread out across the stage, with no single center of focus. PNB's dancers look confident and individual.

He had previously choreographed the adagio in modern style as an extended pas de deux in which the man, often while lying on the floor, reaches up to partner the woman with a fervent worshipfulness. She is distant, slowly rising on pointe while she arches backward, both supported and unsupported, perhaps the man's muse, an unattainable ideal. She mimes shoving the man with her outstretched flexed foot, but later he tenderly supports her leg in the same flexed-foot position. Poetic, enigmatic, and passionate, the dance was easily adapted for pointe work.

The challenge of exploring a new style excites him. He became fascinated by pointe work when choreographing for a ballet company and looks forward to further opportunities. His method combines thorough preparation at home and interaction in the studio. Knowing his rehearsal time with PNB would be limited, he went to Seattle with a complete set of notes. But his approach is never dry: "I love dancers. They make my life possible. When people respond to the process, that's so helpful. So I tend to ask, Is that workable for you? And it's an exchange, always."

We talk in Simons's New York City apartment, where clean lines, airy space, wooden floor, and a slender floor-length mirror create a small but orderly studio. A big desk holds a neat stack of manila folders that include ideas he is brimming with for television as well as theater dances. In his apartment he tries everything out on his own rangy body (he has recently stopped dancing onstage), and, when necessary for his space-consuming choreography, he says he just turns around at the refrigerator and works back toward the mirror. Next to the mirror hangs a ruler: "Work tends to go between this and that," he says, pointing to one and then the other. "I do a fair amount of measuring and calculating, and self-reflection is also a great part of the process. It's always done with the entire person--your soul and heart and subconscious. But the mind plays a great part. I like having time to consider my options."

Simons grew up in the small, pretty town of Beesel in the south of Holland. Always inclined toward making objects from clay, paper, and such, as a small boy he would also direct his friends in arranging gardens of sticks just so. "Then I saw pictures of Firebird. There was Maria Tallchief. And I was really thunderstruck by it. I thought, Isn't it amazing? People can do this, that I've been doing with stuff. Then we got a TV, and there were dance programs, so I started imitating.

"There was no way I could tell my folks that I was going to be a dancer. So I sort of escaped. I said I wanted to go to an arts school in Breda; that was just barely acceptable. I took a phone book and found a lady, Margriet Franken, who had worked as a student with Paul Taylor. That was very lucky for me." He was sixteen and a real self-starter.

Franken arranged for him to audition for Lucas Hoving, who was dance director at the Rotterdam Conservatory of Music and Dance. Simons was accepted. The well-rounded education there included Hoving's Limon technique, Graham, and some Cunningham, as well as ballet, ethnic dance, music, anatomy, dance history, improvisation, and also composition, to which he immediately gravitated.

He likes to tell the story that when Hoving asked him how rehearsals were going for his first piece, Chantal Meteor (1974), Simons complained that the attention of his dancers drifted, adding, "And then it's very hard to work because I find them not so inspiring." Simons says, "Lucas nearly fell over laughing. He said, `Boy, have you got it backward. It's your responsibility--you cannot expect people to give anything to you without you giving them more.'" It was a lesson Simons took to heart.

After graduating with honors, Simons then came to New York City in 1974 on a study grant to train at the Merce Cunningham studio. He also took ballet at the Joffrey School. Simons says, `I'll never forget when I saw Merce's company the first time, when I was still in Breda: I saw dance that was so pure and to the point and had no extraneous elements. And the designs by brilliant visual artists appealed to me greatly.

"And then, of course, being here, I went to the New York City Ballet a lot. So there's Merce and there's Balanchine. Graham did great things. Then people I've worked with--Karole Armitage for a year ... I was greatly impressed with theatrical abundance! And it all becomes this big melting pot, and eventually you hope that something comes out that's yours."

He returned to Holland in 1975 as a member of the Rotterdam Dance Group (at that time called Werkcentrum Dans) and went on to become a resident choreographer. The company's director, Kathy Gosschalk, has been a mentor and watchdog to him. In 1979 he established his U.S. company, Ton Simons and Dancers, which included the quintessentially streamlined dancer (and choreographer in her own right) Brenda Daniels ("the main lady in my gang"). Critic and choreographer Gus Solomons jr wrote of the group as "some of the classiest dancers on the planet," and he called Daniels "one of God's gifts to modern dance." Simons's view of her seems to reflect the relationship of the man and woman--muse in the pas de deux of The Tenderness of Patient Minds and in several other duets. Daniels admits that he has presented her as an ideal woman, "which," she says, "made me very happy."

"I love Ton," she says. "He's the most extraordinary--not just artist, but person, ever. A gentle, advanced kind of person. He shows it's a myth that a choreographer has to be cruel. Everybody who works with him adores him. His work is very beautiful. When he comes into the studio, he's well prepared but flexible. He has some phrases worked out as the basis of the dance. Although he might change something, there's no waiting around for inspiration to strike. Especially in partnering, he is likely to go with what's happening. He likes to incorporate happy mistakes." Daniels, who recently took a teaching position at the prestigious North Carolina School of the Arts, was very pleased that she was able to arrange a ten-week residency for Simons in 1998. He returns to choreograph a new work for NCSA to three movements from Bartok's Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin that will be performed May 6 through 9. Simons had revised The Tenderness of Patient Minds on NCSA students. "A good time was had by all," he says. "I was very impressed by the set-up--the pursuit of excellence is the driving force."

Thanks to his visual arts background, Simons has always collaborated in creating a total stage picture for his works. Lighting and spare decor can create dramatic atmosphere: A long section in his 1993 Divertimento K. 563 shows only upper bodies; Composition for Dancers and Color (1995) uses changing light and colored panels; dancers' shadows become their partners in Song, for which he won the Sonia Gaskell Prize. His sense of space, air, and light seems related to the paintings of his fellow countryman Jan Vermeer. When talk turns to such great Dutch painters, he says, "I love Vermeer. There's a clarity that's almost frightening, how every detail is in place. I see his painting as a completely thought-out composition. There is such complete harmony and balance, as in Balanchine or Cezanne or Merce."

The visual arts have been a definite inspiration in a number of ways. For example, he cites the idea of context: "What we call meaning is very tied in with context. What you call `fast' in one context, because it's surrounded by slow movements, looks less fast when it's surrounded by all fast movements. I think that affects the way we perceive the world. When I first learned about cubism, I thought, Oh, that can be done in dance also. You can have a fractured focus. You can look at things from more than one point of view, and that can be done in dance. That's something that Merce does, too. Ideas like that I try to render in dance, since I'm fairly obsessed with it. Intellectual concerns are just means to show some ideas about perception or about context. But always it has to function as dance.

"And you have to make something work. The work that that requires interests me. Some people find the daily grind a chore, but I think actually a great deal of the joy is in rehearsing and fine-tuning. Lord knows it's a very hard profession, so if you don't truly love that part of it, then it becomes so much harder."

Music of all sorts can inspire him. One 1997 work has a score by Simons's next-door neighbor in New York, Matthew Shipp, whose current jazz compositions he could not avoid heating. He called the dance Through the Wall. It joined Cunningham's Cargo X on a Rotterdam Dance Company double bill. For Small Triptych, which premiered in Rotterdam last January, he put the music together himself ("It's like an attic, with lots of bits strewn about").

His many recent works set to Mozart have included the powerful and moving 1989 Grace, set to the "Great" Mass in C Minor, K. 427. The citation for the National Choreography Prize of the Netherlands, which it received, praised Grace for "visualiz[ing] the splendor of the human voice ... subtly conveying emotion and sensuality."

"With other composers, I give myself much more leeway," he says, "but Mozart's music more or less tells me what to do. His music is so endlessly giving, and so incredibly rich and emotionally deep, and so inconceivably inventive that there are too many possibilities, rather than not enough. And it gives me such joy to do that. I've always been intimidated because of what Balanchine said about Mozart's music, and, of course, it's true: There's no way of even remotely approaching it. We all try to do the impossible. But it's such an enormous way to learn, because it's like being surrounded by pure love--all the agony, and all the ecstasy. And then it has the total invention. So it's incredible to be in the studio with that. Even if you think, Well, I've failed this, you have a wonderful time failing miserably!" He laughs his hearty laugh. "You want to challenge yourself with the best dance you can think of."

Now Simons is turning to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, source for much of the score of Magnificat--For a New City (works by John Cage and Philip Glass were also used). He was excited about working with such music and with six solo dancers and a corps of twenty-eight. "Bach is an incredible lesson," he says. "It's another realm from Mozart, a different color emotionally. Mozart says, `Let's have a glass of wine.' Bach says, `Let's have a glass of wine, but let's keep our heads cool.'"

And that dual proposal for a glass of wine and a cool head characterizes Ton Simons's own work as well.

Dance Magazine senior editor Marilyn Hunt divides her time between New York City and Santa Fe.